With over two decades of Asia-Pacific experience, Ray Tsuchiyama has held country P & L roles for AOL Mobile, Analog Devices, and Nuance Communications. He was head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Asia Office. His consulting clients include Google, Inc., Mitsubishi Electric Corp., Marubeni, and Silicon Valley venture capital firms; he was the Time Warner representative at a mobile SNS start-up Board. He has published essays on leadership, innovation, and global business, especially in Emerging Markets. He has been quoted in The New York Times, Newsweek, Bangkok Post, Toyo Keizai, The China Daily, and Financial Times. He is on the Board of Governors for the Pacific and Asian Affairs Council and appointed to the Pacific Hawaii District Export Council (Department of Commerce). (Ray Tsuchiyama's Note: The opinions expressed in my blog posts are solely my own and do not reflect the views of current or past consulting clients.)

Viewing North Korea from Japan's Perspective

Winston Churchill’s description of the then-called Soviet Union – “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” — more than covers the isolated, strange state of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea.

During the last two decades living in Tokyo, I viewed North Korea through the filter of Japanese media coverage over the years. Various characters in the North Korean socio-political psycho-drama appeared on the media stage, and I remember them all.

For example, in 2001 the late North Korean leader’s Kim Jong-Il’s eldest son, Kim Jong Nam, a plumpish then-30 year-old with a beard was arrested by Japanese police when he presented a Dominican Republic passport to enter Japan. During police interrogations, Jong Nam said that his life-long desire was to visit Tokyo Disneyland. He was accompanied by what seemed to be his girlfriend, a nanny and a small child, and the entire troupe was deported. His face was splashed all over the Japanese media and embarrassed Kim Jong Il (as a parent, I can empathize with the departed Leader — if the son said that he was going to enter Tokyo University Medical School or study karate, that’s different). Several years later the ever-aggressive Japanese media caught up with Kim Jong Nam and filmed him walking around a Macau casino (Jong Nam seems to like flashy, entertainment-filled places, completely different from Pyongyang – but who can blame him?) – and his English was fair (his Japanese is reportedly very good, as he had spent time in Japan, especially Ginza nightclubs, on previous clandestine visits). Of course I was not surprised at reports of him, the eldest son, not on the invitation list to the North Korean state funeral for his father.

Even before Kim Jong Nam’s visit the Japanese media had been focusing on the Japanese abductees – rampant violations of international sovereignty, truly criminal activity — where Japanese families pressed the Japanese government to make North Korea tell the truth of possibly hundreds of Japanese (in Japan and even in Western Europe) kidnapped by North Korean agents and taken to North Korea. The North Korean government had always denied such allegations – until a remarkable meeting on September 17, 2002 when Kim Jong Il told that Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in Pyongyang that North Korea had abducted 13 Japanese citizens and apologized. He said that a “rogue” agency had done the abductions and he had not been aware of the agency’s actions and disavowed them. Just a month later North Korea allowed five Japanese abductees to return to Japan, on the condition that they return later to the North. The Japanese media was relentless in its coverage of the “homecoming”, and the fall television news was filled with images of the group, who all later did not return to North Korea. Two years later, the children of two families returned to Japan.

One repatriated victim – Hitomi Soga (her mother was abducted along with her, and she was never heard from again) – had a more complex situation: while in North Korea she married an American defector, a diminutive Private Charles Jenkins from North Carolina. Over the years, several U.S. Army defectors were housed in Pyongyang (Jenkins even played a part in North Korean movie as an American general); in another Pyongyang compound were Japanese Red Guards defectors* who hijacked a JAL plane to Pyongyang. Soga reunited with her husband and two girls, and they are now happily living on Sado Island, where Jenkins promotes local vegetable products in a shop (many tourists take photos alongside him). He did report to duty to a U.S. Army Base in Japan (ironic again, since U.S. bases are there to protect Japan from North Korean attack) where he was court-martialed (in his sixties, he wore again his private uniform), spent time in the stockade, and dishonorably discharged. The surreal saga of Soga and Jenkins (and children) plight was shown in the Japanese media in a warm, positive light, as Jenkins was seen as a kind, gentle man who protected the younger Japanese woman against the North Korean authorities. Living in Japan for the last seven years, Jenkins has also become a completely pro-American U.S. citizen, and his sad life reminds me of the children’s story “Man without an Country”, where the protagonist renounces U.S. citizenship and wanders the oceans homesick for America.

In the 1970s into the “Bubble Economy” of the 1980s, Japan was the object of love/hate for North Korea. North Korea’s next-door neighbor China had none of the technological wonders that Japan had developed (electronics, cars, ships, bullet trains) and Japan was seen by North Korea as taking over the world with its coveted products. On one hand, North Korea propaganda stressed an anti-Japanese obsession – even the North Korean People’s Army top soccer team was named after the month/day that North Korean guerillas opened its guerilla campaign against Japanese colonial security forces, yet according to one Japanese TV report that I recall North Korea was rumored to have invested in an underground replica of a Japanese shopping mall staffed by Japanese-speaking North Koreans, and spies would be trained in everyday conversations. In order to train the North Korean staff, native Japanese would be required, hence the spy agency’s abductions of Japanese along beaches (there have been many Japanese sightings of dinghies with North Korean agents launched from disguised fishing trawlers or short-range submarines – analogous to aliens from another planet).

Japan also figures as a place where some North Korean citizens live. More than 600,000 ethnic Koreans – mostly the second- and third-generation descendents of Korean forced laborers (some use the word “abduction” without irony) during World War II – live in Japan, and some have North Korean passports. After World War II with Japan’s surrender and end of the Japanese Empire, no Japanese Empire passports were valid (even during World War II top students from the colonies studied in Japan, including a former President of Taiwan, a 1941 Kyoto University graduate; even a former President of South Korea was a lieutenant in the Japanese Imperial Army and enjoyed singing Japanese songs — in secret). Therefore, former Empire citizens still resident in Japan had to choose a country of citizenship; most ethnic Koreans chose South Korea and about 150,000 opted for North Korea — the reasons for the latter ranged from one’s parents’ hometown was in North Korea to sympathies for a new workers’ state. Some did acquire Japanese citizenship later, but for many, receiving Japanese citizenship while born and raised in Japan, is still extremely challenging.) The North Korean residents’ association runs separate schools and even universities – and graduates face extreme discrimination from Japanese employers. Many Japanese are perplexed (and some angered) why the North Korean residents association supported Kim Jong Il as their country’s leader in spite of the abductions and many other violations of international law, yet some North Korean citizens in Japan, fluent in Japanese (and never been to North Korea), see instead Japanese hypocrisy, reciting a litany of daily discrimination against them, in education, jobs, housing, health care, pension, marriage, and citizenship — a “virtual” ghetto-ization of the community.

Interestingly, the Japanese prime minister who was pivotal in the release of the abductees group in 2002, Junichiro Koizumi, visited the North Korean resident association Tokyo headquarters to pay his respects to the late Kim Jong Il.

The heir-apparent Kim Jong Un has Japanese ties: his mother, Ko Young-hee, was born into an ethnic Korean family in Osaka, one of several Japanese cities with Korean minorities (others are Kobe, Kyoto, Fukuoka). She accompanied her parents as a child to North Korea during the stream of Korean repatriates from Japan to the “Workers’ Paradise” (in the early 1960s North Korea was actually seen as a progressing economically – later many returned to Japan, disillusioned by strict controls, lack of personal freedoms, a floundering economy – and rumors point to North Korean agents also passed into Japan at that time). Ko gave birth to Kim Jong Il’s son, and later passed away from cancer in the early 2000s (although this is disputed, like so many facts, in North Korea). So Kim Jong Un probably speaks some Japanese, through his mother (he was educated at a Swiss boarding school, so his English, French and German must be much more fluent, and he may have been tutored in Korean).

Then Princess Tenko returns to the media. During my years in Tokyo I watched late-night shows featuring Princess Tenko Hikita (Mariko Itakura) – a Japanese magician with long braided hair like a Japanese anime character “Sailor Moon” who specialized in Houdini-esque illusion tricks, escaping from giant water tanks at TV studios. Kim Jong Il invited her at least three times for private shows, the last visit probably after his stroke. It is amazing that she even accepted an invitation to visit North Korea (she spoke about being pressured to stay in Pyongyang and showered with a mansion, maid, money), knowing about the Japanese abductees history, and it is doubly-amazing that she – of all people – has been contacted via Email and phone by a Kim “relative” to attend the state funeral on December 28. Princess Tenko may be only foreigner without a diplomatic passport at the state funeral. Again, there is Kim Jong Il’s deep interest in Japan, even Japanese magic (perhaps he sought transformational “magic” for his society and himself).

So, with the younger Kim Jong Un’s ascension to power in North Korea, there will still be entangling issues between North Korea and Japan, especially as the Japanese (and many other nationalities, including thousands of South Koreans) abductions case is not resolved – there have been purported sightings of Japanese abductees still alive in North Korea. North Korea also provided death certificates for a group who the North claimed were dead, but a couple of years later the government stated that certificates were forgeries. So the very sad mystery continues unless Kim Jong Un comes clean, totally clean, on the abductions issue, for all families, from Europe to the Middle East to South Korea to Japan.

*Later, the Japanese Red Guards’ wives would travel to North Korea, and their children – with Japanese citizenship through their parents – would later relocate to Japan, completing a full circle.

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I commend you for mentioning, even if in a somewhat downplayed way, the fact that Japan essentially “abducted” millions of Koreans during WW2:

“According to the calculation of R. J. Rummel, a total of 5.4 million Koreans were also conscripted into forced labor, and shipped throughout the Japanese Empire. Of these, 210,000 to 870,000 Koreans died during forced labor in places such as Manchuria and Sakhalin.” — source Rummel, R. J. (1999). Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1990

And that you also mentioned the fact that to this day, the Japan-born decedents, of the estimated 650,000 Korens who stayed in Japan after the war, are still actively discriminated against by the Japanese Culture and the Government of Japan.

That said, I think that you missed a rather large issue of modern abduction by Japan.

You point out N. Korea’s “rampant violations of international sovereignty”, yet neglect to mention that Japan is one of the top destination countries for International Child Abduction. Every year, 1000′s of children are kidnapped from their countries of birth by Japanese parents – often in violation of the laws (and even active court orders) of the children’s native countries.

Further, the Government of Japan has even been caught participating in these kidnappings by providing false documentation; such as providing passports with false names in order to aid Japanese nationals in bypassing watch-lists when fleeing jurisdiction and kidnapping children against active court orders.

Japan has even allowed Japanese relatives to abduct children from sole-living non-Japanese parents.

Worse yet, Japanese courts in effect use child abduction as the normal method of determining custody of children in their “sole-custody with non-enforceable visitation” divorce system.

Japan “justifies” all of the above (the racism, ethnic segregation, child abduction, etc.) by claiming that they have a “unique” culture.

All of the actions mentioned above are actually in violation of both the constitution of Japan and International treaties to which Japan is signatory to:

For example: Article 14: All of the people are equal under the law and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin

Article 98 of the Japanese Constitution states: The treaties concluded by Japan and established laws of nations shall be faithfully observed.

Some of these Human Rights treaties which Japan actively ignores: – The Convention Against Torture, and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment > Yet Japan refuses to stop the practice of “Daiyo-Kangoku”. The “Substitute Prisons” that have long been condemned by human rights groups, due to the inhumane treatment, denial of legal council, and the common practice coerced confessions of arrested detainees – who can be held in this facilities for 24 days at a time; again without even being charged.

The Convention on The Rights of the Child > Which already states, in article 11, that “States Parties shall take measures to combat” international child abduction. Japan instead supports and even fosters a legal environment which promotes the practice.

The Convention on The Rights of the Child also repeatedly states the rights of the parent-child relationship (see articles 5, 7, 9, 10, 14, 18, 19), something which Japan again ignores.

In fact, any parent attempting to see their abducted child(ren) in Japan runs the risk of finding themselves arrested and locked up in one of the above mentioned Daiyo-Kangoku.

And again, Japan ignores all of the above and claims that they are “unique”, and that their “uniqueness” overrides the need to meet their international treaty obligations.

So, while Japan is obviously not morally equivalent to N. Korea…. They stil have a long way to go. And until they stop stealing the children of the world and ignoring both the sovereignty of other countries and their international treaty obligations, they really don’t have much of a moral platform from which to attack N. Korea.